MST3K (K16)
K16 - City on Fire - Well, more like One Street in a Canadian Movie Lot on Fire, but close enough for a TV movie. Shelly Winters and Leslie Neilsen in a disaster movie together? Man, I love The Poseidon Adventure! Alas, this flick wasn't fit to shine Mrs. Rosen's swimming medal. It was also a criminal waste of a very old-looking Henry Fonda. On a positive note, I haven't seen so many stunt men on fire in a while.
The riffing was as good as it ever has been this season. The guys don't have too many quiet periods and all three of them get a number of good lines in. However, Josh continues to annoy by interrupting both Joel and Trace's jokes. Joel and Trace constantly had to re-start their jokes in this ep when they had the misfortune to begin speaking at the same time Josh did.
One of the host segments also features the first of Joel's inventions (unless K01-K03 had some?). It's an anti-theft purse that bursts into flames. It's nice to see a host segment that ties into the movie. I like those.
Just from a technical perspective, this is a good show to illustrate the differences in the production of a UHF MST and a cable MST. The audio for Servo in the episode was terrible. Josh's voice would often be far too quiet to hear and then suddenly revert back to normal volume. About 10% of his riffs this time out were inaudible to me. I notice that their regular audio guy was the director this time. I'm thinking he was spending too much time trying to figure out how to direct and not enough time with his ears in the headphones. As well, there were numerous flubs inside the theater that a cable-era director would've yelled "Cut!" for. Both Josh and Trace sneeze flemily into their mics and, at one point, Trace looses his grip on Crow and the poor bot falls off-screen. JatB cover these events well, but I don't remember any such goofs making it into the cable shows I've seen.
"Put the doobage out." Joel: making it hard for teachers to show MST in class since 1989.
If I've learned anything today, it's: never offer a better job to a psycho maintenance man without making sure the fire insurance is up-to-date. (5/10)
film d. Alvin Rakoff (1978)
mst d. Todd Ziegler (19 Mar 1989)
